J.D. Vance, like Donald Trump, is an unprincipled demagogue and a habitual liar willing to cross any moral line in his pursuit of power. There is, however, an important difference between the two men that has grown increasingly evident in recent days. Vance, unlike Trump, understands the difference between truth and a lie and cares about it. He does not care enough to actually stop lying, of course. But somewhere within his brain there is a faint buzzing sound that goes off when he says things he knows are not true. And so, unlike Trump, for whom rationalizations are unnecessary, he feels compelled to explain away his duplicity.
Bizarre claims about pet abductions in Springfield began burbling up in far right channels, and made their way into the Trump campaign through Vance. “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” he tweeted on September 9, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”
The same morning Vance tweeted this, a staffer from his office began inquiring as to whether it was true. Springfield city manager Bryan Heck fielded a call from a Vance staffer after Vance’s tweet. “He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck later told The Wall Street Journal. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”
Vance responded defiantly. “My office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” he tweeted, without revealing that he had already been informed the rumors were false. However, he immediately pivoted from this concession to a defense. There were larger truths, or half-truths, revealed by the rumors:
Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here. That local health services have been overwhelmed. That communicable diseases — like TB and HIV — have been on the rise. That local schools have struggled to keep up with newcomers who don’t know English. That rents have risen so fast that many Springfield families can’t afford to put a roof over their head.
In fact, not all these things were confirmed. A child was not “murdered” by a Haitian migrant, as his grieving parents explained, but killed accidentally. The claim about diseases, which happens to track old racist tropes about immigrants, is likewise false. “Information from the county health department,” as the Journal notes, “shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023 — the lowest since 2015.”
Having moved the debate away from debunked claim onto other grounds, Vance asserted that the debunkers, who were factually correct, “didn’t give a shit about these suffering Americans until yesterday.” And therefore, he concluded, “don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.”
That night after he tweeted this defense was the debate, during which Trump repeated the bizarre claim. (“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs! The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”)
Despite (or perhaps because of) the infamy this claim brought upon Trump, Vance continued to take ownership of it. He began pressing his case that the story revealed the hypocrisy of the news media rather than any failing on his part.
“It’s important for journalists to actually get on the ground and cover this stuff for themselves,” he insisted piously to CNN’s Kaitlin Collins. “I think it’s interesting, Kaitlin, that the media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats.”
Vance was justified in lying, in other words, to draw attention to Springfield’s plight. And the fact reporters were debunking his lies merely proves their moral hollowness — in the absence of his lies, they wouldn’t have covered the subject at all.
Vance reiterated this theme a few days later, speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash. “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said. Vance was not quite confessing to a lie. Instead he was confessing to a total indifference to truth in service of what he called a noble populist agenda.
When a reporter asked him shortly after if he had any responsibility to fact-check the claims of animal abduction before he circulated them, Vance again turned the charge against the press, saying, “I think the media has a responsibility to fact-check the residents of Springfield, not lie about them.”
It was the media that was fact-checking, and it was Vance who was lying. Vance had been informed by the town manager at the outset that his claims were unfounded.
The Journal’s reporting from the city includes a remarkable detail, tracing the rumor to its point of origination:
A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later — found safe in her own basement.
Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.
For all of Vance’s attempt to hide his own smarmy demagoguery behind the townspeople of Springfield, the city’s residents are, for the most part, decent. Some of the residents may harbor suspicions about their immigrant neighbors, but they are willing to change their minds and concede error.
Vance has no such virtue. If his lies are debunked, he attacks the debunkers. The problems of Springfield’s people are of interest to him only insofar as they can be used to spread fear of immigrant communities. As far as Vance is concerned, the worst possible thing that could happen in Springfield would be prosperity and mutual understanding.
Vance grasps, at some level, that is the incentive he has followed. That is why the buzzing noise keeps sounding in his mind and why he keeps emitting these clever-sounding noisy gusts of air that he hopes will drown it out.
